And what a busy week it was! with 7,300 attendees at the Messe in Berlin the exhibition hall was busy from the word go. Of course, it may have helped that Microsoft deliberately planned the conference to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, but whatever it was TechEd 09 was a sell out event and that is a rare occurrence at the moment.
The partner event on the Monday evening was busy, but then we expected it to be and we gave away most of our T shirts, in fact Rachel had to order reinforcements for the rest of the week! What we didn’t expect of course was that the rest of the week would be just as busy. There were literally hordes (that is the collective noun for developers, right?) of developers around the booth, eager to hear the latest news about their favourite product. In the past the main topic of interest as been WPF and Silverlight, those two platforms vying for supremacy amongst developer’s interest. However, the last two conferences I’ve been too, and again here, developers have been showing more and more interest in XAF. Of course, as the evangelist for XAF that is music to my ears. In fact at this conference the very first person I spoke to wanted a demonstration of XAF! So, go us!
On Thursday I delivered a session to the architecture track on Technical Debt. It fits in quite well with the development issues that RefactorPro! can help you with and also, it deals with the interest on Technical Debt – something CodeRush can help you reduce. So, whilst the talk doesn’t directly promote our tools, my presentation speaks to the philosophy behind them. I’d never spoken to a TechEd audience before and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The atmosphere is quite different from other conference and user groups that I’ve spoken at. Very intense, and let’s just say, you’d better be on top of your game or the audience will call you out. :-)
One of the highlights of any large conference is meeting old friends, both customers and other “techies”, that I only get to meet two or three times a year at the big conferences. One of them (thanks Betsy) took, what Rachel reliably informs me is, the only half decent photograph of me at TechED. Though I think she only said that cos she’s in it too LOL. You can always rely on your friends to bring you down to earth eh?
And before we knew it, it was Friday and it was all over. Time to pack up the booth and say goodbye to old and new friends alike, buoyed by the knowledge that we’ll all be back to do it again next year, where I’m already looking forward to demonstrating the latest and greatest product line up from DevExpress. See you there!